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Network World

As pretty much everyone knows, the Internet of Things (IoT) hype has been going strong for a few years now. I’ve done my part, no doubt, covering the technology extensively for the past 9 months. As vendors and users all scramble to cash in, it often seems like nothing can stop the rise IoT.

Maybe not, but there have been rumblings of a backlash to the rise of IoT for several years. Consumer and experts worry that the IoT may not easily fulfill its heavily hyped promise, or that it will turn out to be more cumbersome than anticipated, allow serious security issues, and compromise our privacy.

Judging by all the media attention that The Internet of Things (or IoT) gets these days, you would think that the world was firmly in the grip of a physical and digital transformation. The truth, though, is that we all are still in the early days of the IoT.

It was inevitable. Once Google published its findings for the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities in CPUs, the bad guys used that as a roadmap to create their malware. And so far, researchers have found more than 130 malware samples designed to exploit Spectre and Meltdown.

If there is any good news, it’s that the majority of the samples appear to be in the testing phase, according to antivirus testing firm AV-TEST, or are based on proof-of-concept software created by security researchers. Still, the number is rising fast.

Comeback kid AMD announced on its quarterly earnings call that it intends to have a silicon fix for the variant 2 of the Spectre exploit, the only one of the Meltdown and Spectre exploits it’s vulnerable to, by 2019 with its new Zen 2 core.

The company also said it will ramp up GPU card production to meet the insane demand these days thanks to cryptominers, although it said the biggest challenge will be to find enough memory to make the cards.

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If portions of enterprise data-center networks have no need to communicate directly with the internet, then why do we configure routers so every system on the network winds up with internet access by default?

Part of the reason is that many enterprises use an internet perimeter firewall performing port address translation (PAT) with a default policy that allows access the internet, a solution that leaves open a possible path by which attackers can breach security.

Fitness network Strava publishes a global heatmap of where users are running and working out using its services, and folks just figured out that the map includes information that could reveal the locations of military forces working out in sensitive and sometimes secret locations. One expert worried that “tracking the timing of movements on bases could provide valuable information on patrol routes or where specific personnel are deployed.”

Microsegmentation is a method of creating secure zones in data centers and cloud deployments that allows companies to isolate workloads from one another and secure them individually. It’s aimed at making network security more granular.

Microsegmentation vs. VLANs, firewalls and ACLs

Network segmentation isn’t new. Companies have relied on firewalls, virtual local area networks (VLAN) and access control lists (ACL) for network segmentation for years. With microsegmentation, policies are applied to individual workloads for greater attack resistance.

Hackers can crack them, and users are careless with them. Passwords have long been problematic, but they are getting renewed attention after a series of major breaches. Our panelists look at the coming technology to help with password security.

As the explosive growth of IoT tech continues; businesses, vendors and consumers all have to confront the issue that the world is more connected than ever before, with potentially gigantic consequences.

The central problem with IoT security is that there is no central problem – IoT is a more complicated stack than traditional IT infrastructure and is much more likely to be made up of hardware and software from different sources.